I still have the CD in a box somewhere. It was loaned to me by a friend and I never gave it back. Hilariously, I still see that friend, so that might make for a fun conversation.

I do want to state that the flight model has NOTHING on Elite. But otherwise, it is in a lot of ways a game which I wish Elite was a lot closer to.

Friends and I downloaded it, prompted by this post. There’s a little bit of awkwardness and animation jank, but man, does the game get the core concept right.

Space is not flat, the ship feels like a near arcane contraption, rail guns should feel like they’ll punch a hole in a small planet, and grappling hooks always feel good. These guys know what I’m looking for. The only thing I could genuinely ask for is a more true to physics flight model, but ultimately, I’ll be too busy taking down fighters using a rocket launcher while gravity-booted to the nose of my ship to care too much.

0% homelessness in China btw.

Which is like the US declaring homelessness a federal crime, imprisoning everyone who lives on the streets, and calling homelessness a solved problem.

“Everyone who is critical of me is woke.”

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I hate that you get downvoted for pointing out the reality of the situation.

Relative to the price of everything else, $80 for a AAA videogame is actually reasonable. The problem is that rent has gone up drastically, food has gone up drastically, and our wages have stagnated. Getting pissed off at Gearbox for charging $80 for Borderlands 4, and then paying $15 for a burger and fries without an equal reaction just doesn’t seem sensible to me.

Everything is awful, and videogame devs aren’t the ones stealing all our buying power.

I agree. The war in Ukraine can only truly be resolved by removing it’s root causes. Remove Putin, and the war ends.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called Canada a “socialist regime”

God, I fucking wish.

That’s an interesting take. I found them to be very different people. Two different flavours of cliche’d anime protagonist, sure, but very different people none the less.

My partner and I make a point to occasionally play through a couch co-op game as well. Here are some of the things we enjoyed.

Phogs - Currently playing this. It’s a cute, dog-themed puzzle game thing, where you play as two heads of a single long dog-thing. We’re enjoying it, but we’re not particularly deep in, and I do wonder if it’ll get Ibb and Obb samey, but it’s worth checking out imo.

Cassette Beasts - Couch co-op, Pokemon inspired, adventure RPG with great storytelling, fantastic music and a retro aesthetic. The world is very Zelda-like in exploration and puzzle solving, while combat is Pokemon double battles. Highly recommended, just be aware that one player gets to be the player-made protagonist, while the other is one of an interchangeable series of partner characters.

Sea of Stars - The co-op update did a lot of good for this game. A Chrono Trigger inspired, faux-SNES era, indie RPG. There’s a lot of unvoiced dialogue, which I could see as being a barrier to enjoyment as a multiplayer game, but the game is paced quite well, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem. Also, players do take turns inputting commands, but everyone is responsible for the timed hits/blocks, and you each control a character of equal agency in the overworld, so it avoids the largest co-op turn based RPG folly of having one player and one half-watching “follower.” There are a ton of accessibility options/features (difficulty is VERY malleable), and as an added bonus, there’s a free story DLC coming on the 20th.

Children of Morta - This is perhaps the most “hardcore” of my list, but the girlfriend, despite explicitly not enjoying “hard” games, really really enjoyed this one. An action-RPG with some very light roguelike elements, Children of Morta has you play as a family of hunter-gatherer-warrior types in a fantasy world, working together to stop a malevolent power from corrupting the physical world. Each family member has a different playstyle, their own skill tree, and a lot of personality. The game is very story driven, with a few moments being taken between each run for the fantastic narration to drip feed the narrative, slowly teaching you more about the world, the characters, and their family dynamic.

These are the ones that came to the top of my mind, either because they were particularly good or, in the case of Phogs, is ongoing. If I see anything else worth mentioning when I look at my Steam list next, I’ll add.

I believe we (as in, people) all have a responsibility to hold each other accountable. But we can also only do so much, and inserting yourself into a toxic community founded for the sole goal of normalizing that toxicity in some misguided attempt to reform such people is beyond what any one person can be expected to engage with.

I explicitly stay away from such groups. I call it out in person, and politely check my friends when they say something that they might not realize is harmful, exactly the same way I expect them to check me, but that’s just it. That kind of discourse isn’t welcome in these groups because they were created with one explicit purpose: to justify and normalize the absolute shittiest behavioursof the most sexiest of male culture.

She’s right, it isn’t a small amount of men. But it’s a supermajority in certain circles, and a tiny, neglible minority in others. She, unfortunately, exposed herself to the worst of men enmasse. We should instead go to those latter circles, and avoid/ostracize those former circles, until they realize if their only goal is sex, they’ll have to figure out how to be a decent person first. And men, choose to be better.

I’m not home right now, but I’ll follow up with more formal testing either tomorrow or the next day. I’m very interested in why such similiar machines get completely different performance.

The machine in question is sporting a Ryzen 3600, for discussion sake.

My partners RX6600 holds 80 FPS on mid settings without framegen. Maybe the gap between med and high is larger than I realize, or there’s an ultra setting I hadn’t noticed, but the author’s experiences still seem out of whack.

I feel like this has been a trend lately. New, high-fidelity game releases, and the wave of “UNOPTIMIZED GARBAGE!” “dev, fix ur game!” starts rolling, only for myself, and the majority of people I speak to personally, to have no real issues. Feels rude to play this card, but I am starting to lean towards most people having no idea how to care for their machine, in a lot of cases, and rarely facing some weirdly specific drive/card compatibility stuff.

This thread is actually huge, so apologies if this has already been recommended, but take a look at Against the Storm. It’s an indie city-builder with a bit of a rogue-like spin. You can usually get it on fairly deep sales, and the rogue-like elements combined with some meta-progression gives it a real play length, even though a single city-building session is a ~45-60 minute experience.

Okay, for a VR indie title? Gorn did incredible.

Male’s haven’t been actively repressed as a result of their gender for thousands of years. Simply switching the genders does not work because they’re not equitible terms. Systematically speaking, they come from different backgrounds and expectations.

I take your point that “female” as a durogatory term is relative to the context it’s used in. But we can’t pretend we’ve lived in a world of equal opportunity that treats men and women, males and females, equally in trying to make that point.

Mhmm. Everyone is shitting on Nintendo, but the reality is their games are literally keeping up with inflation. The problem is that our wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and the cost of living has, at least, kept up. In some cases (rent), it’s grown faster than the inflation of everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo is tone deaf for making this decision now, and I suspect they’d still make billions with a $15 price increase rather than a $30 one. I’m not defending them. But the picture is a lot larger than them.

It can be both.